Movies that deserved a lot more credit......

Sarkar Raj

I liked Godfather 2 more than Godfather 1. Reason – Evolution. If Godfather had Michael Corleone as an upstart, a really smart one at that, Godfather 2 humanizes him. Shows him as a power hungry ruthless cold blooded Mafioso who doesn’t mind killing his own brother. If Shankar Nagre already achieved that by the end of Sarkar, in Sarkar 2 we see him as a do gooder who does anything and everything to do what he thinks is right as he keeps reminding us throughout the movie. Also the power struggle is not just with the outsiders but also in a more restrained manner with his own father. We can see the thin rope that the father-son walk on as Shankar on more than one occasion disagrees with his father and gets his way. Varma has made a brave movie. Luckily he didn’t sit back on the success of Sarkar and let the script take the easy way out. This movie doesn’t have a opening-middle-end kind of storyline. Instead it has some restrained angst, subtle sub-texts and most importantly a great father-son bonding. What it doesn’t have, is a sound editor, a non-cliched villain and cohesiveness. The movie had a lot of highly predictable Varmaisque sequences. The big tea-table meeting, the opening bang with Shankar playing a tape recorder and killing his henchman and sipping coffee, Sarkar waving out to the crowd like a modern day messiah of the masses, the the big project that promises lot of money but Sarkar has reservations, the whole Rao sahib angle and the kidnapping and the hired killer and and and….But somewhere towards the middle of the second half Varma makes a great deviation from predictability, something so rarely seen in Hindi Cinema. This one moment of pure deviation made me love the movie. He has always been brave and idiosyncratic but after watching Aag I really needed him to redeem himself. The rest of the movie I then realized actually plays around this one moment and the whole conventional Hindi movie sequential movement of storyline went straight out of the window. Because here the things you didn’t notice before suddenly become apparent. However the ending summation by Sarkar is a little drawn out and too elaborate for my liking, I still somehow liked the monologue next to the portrait. See there are small things which you like in the movie that stay with you. A movie as imperfect as Gangster would still stay with you for some amazing sequences however short-lived. Same is the case here. Varma overuses his by now famous shadows and thin ray of light scenes and his camera worships his lead actors. He wants them to be seen as great powerful people and yet we see conflicted people all around. Shankar haunted because he murdered his own brother, Sarkar again because he thinks he couldn’t change his son and Anita (played by a corporate attire clad Ash) whose father is more a businessman than father figure. Abhishek walks through the whole movie with a constipated expression. The Sr Bachchan does a little better and Ash is good when she doesn’t have to talk much. But this is a Director’s movie and as is the case with most director movies, the plot is a moot point. The speeches and dialogues tend to get a little heavy at times, but well they are pardonable this time around. Welcome back to form Mr Varma…

Jabbi Cigarette Jalti Hai – No Smoking

Anurag Kashyap's No Smoking is not just an incredibly original off beat film, it's also a wonderful tribute to some of the best artists of all times. The film supposedly based on Stephen King's Quitter's Inc (I wonder if by the time I die every story that Stephen King has ever written would be adapted into a movie) has a lead protagonist by the name of K. Coming from Anurag Kashyap I'm sure he had Frank Kafka's The Trial in mind. Then there is a bathtub scene that is unbelievably brilliant in its conception. I say that because everything you need to know about K is in that one scene. He epitomizes narcissistic arrogance.  Then there is his wife played by Ayesha Takia who doesn't have much to do but gets your attention nevertheless. We see how his smoking drives them to such point of disconnect that she asks for divorce as an Anniversary gift. We have a squint eyed Ranvir Shorey panic at the sight of a cigarette and declares vehemently that he can't smoke because he loves his wife. Then we meet Paresh Rawal. Hitler loving, finger cutting Baba Bengali. We see K walk down and down and down into an absolute abyss which he can't get out of without signing a contract and cheque for approx 21 lakhs( Baba Bengali takes only 1 rupee of that). Oh by the way that run down godforsaken place has a fingerprint analyser that keeps track of all their patients. He is allowed to go with the condition that he is never to smoke and if he does he will start losing things he loves, starting from his fingers to his wife. Then the film gets so arcane and so metaphorical that I'm surprised this movie was released on the big screen. This is a DVD movie with voice over atleast for the second half. It took me about 2 hours after I came out of the movie to completely convince myself that the whole underground sequence was purely virtual and under the effect of some drugs and stuff. Then in the last 30 minutes there is a great tribute to the Schindler's List gas chamber scene and I think also Fellini's 8 and a half. Bob Fosse's Cabaret sequence is shot brilliantly and Gulzar's lyrics; well what more can be said about Gulzar's writing anyway. I was surprised to see such scathing attacks on the movie. The theatre I was in was probably filled with people who expected an easy on the mind film and were hugely disappointed. That's the problem with some Indian moviegoers, they want variety and yet complain even more than normal when they are provided that. I had to endure similar mutterings and crude remarks during Brokeback Mountain. Well that's about that. I liked the movie for being brave and so obviously trying to be distinctive. As Ebert would say 2 thumbs way up.

Eastern Promises

How do you slit a man's throat? Or more importantly how does it look when you slit a man's throat? After watching so many movies where slitting a man's throat happens with one smooth move of the knife i watched something much more believable in Eastern Promises. It is not like cutting butter. It is more like cutting a hard undercooked piece of meat. I wonder if this was done so that the movie opens with a bang or just to show how difficult it is to kill a man in any way. Well the man being killed is a member of the Russian Mafia. The next scene is in an Indian owned Grocery shop in London (i think) where a heavily pregnant girl is asking for some medicines and is leaking blood from you know where. She is rushed to the hospital where she delivers a baby, leaves behind a highly important diary in the hands of a mid-wife named Anna played by Naomi Watts and dies. Naomi Watts is of Russian origin who has just broken up with her lover (who was black) and is living with her mom and uncle. Her uncle is a typical vindictive relative who believes that any inter racial mingling can only lead to disaster. He also has no qualms to say that this was the reason why Anna lost her baby (she was apparently pregnant once). Anyways now Anna wants the diary translated so she can understand what the dead woman has written. She cares for the baby as if she was her own and names her Christina. On the other side there is the Russian mafia. Semyon who owns a restaurant is one of the leaders. Anna goes to him for translating the book and finds herself strangely intimidated by the sweet talking man. His son Kiril is the one who ordered the first scene murder. This brings us to the most interesting character in the movie. His name is Nikolai played by Viggo Mortenson. He is the driver cum Undertaker cum lot of other things. Now he is supposedly an expert at disposing the bodies. So he cuts off the fingers of the dead man and as he is in this process he nonchalantly puts a cigarette to his mouth and puffs on it. Maybe there are real life characters who are so comfortable in the company of a dead body but is it really necessary to show this in the movie. I don't know, well anyways the dead man has powerful friends as well and now the diary is also a problem for Semyon. Turns out Anna's uncle also knows what's in it. This is where the lives of so many people get intertwined and leads to an extremely violent sauna scene towards the end. Atleast the ending is liberating and has some hope in it. Even the most cold blooded people have a heart and have emotions, thank god for that. I really needed to know that after watching No Country for Old Men. There is something very earthy about a David Cronenberg movie. A history of Violence also was the same. I don't know if this is offbeat cinema but it is simple cinema. Nothing flashy or gimmicky about it. The characters are all flesh and blood people and more than anything else they are all a character study than an actual movie. Even after watching A history of Violence I thought there is nothing special about the movie and yet I couldn't forget it in hurry and same with Eastern Promises. This makes me believe more and more that atleast in my case I remember the characters and not the scenes or the plot. Over the last few years I have noticed something odd about the leading men and leading ladies in movies. The men are becoming colder and more detached, less human. The ladies on the other hand much more sensitive. I don't know if this is just an independent observation  but after watching Eastern Promises I can't help but believe so.....

This post is an entry to the Reel-Life Bloggers contest organized by wogma.com and reviewgang.com